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Ventower Industries

Ventower Industries ™ is a leading North American steel fabricator currently specializing in utility-scale wind turbine tower solutions. They have diversified product offerings to include large steel structures like embedded inserts, pressure vessels, marine foundations and welded tanks. The experienced team of highly skilled and certified fabrication workers manufacture to the highest quality standards and are committed to continuous improvement while achieving key quality objectives and insuring best practice manufacturing.

Understanding the tentacles of ERP, from CRM to accounting to purchasing to engineering

"My name's Todd Keel; I'm the controller for a company that's a relatively new startup called Ventower. We manufacture utility-scale, or distributed-scale windmill towers.

Interviewer [Scott Church]: What prompted you to search for an ERP? What was the deciding factor, "Hey, we need to do something?"

Our company is bootstrapped from day one, and we've got a hodgepodge of computers, and we have the Macs, we have some Linux, we have some Windows machines. We've used a lot of open source for software to get started, and xTuple was one of those that we started with, and, since we've been using it, we found the cost of implementation, the licensing, and the support that we received thus far to be outstanding. So our next step is to go forward and do a full implementation of xTuple utilizing more of the features as we're using it today, we use it as our checkbook. So we're taking that leap into the next iteration and the full features that are offered.

Interviewer [Scott Church]: What was in the Manufacturing Edition that you saw that said, "Hey, we need this?"

I would say that, when you look at the features, the explodable Bill of Materials, the multiple layers, the indenting of the Bill of Materials, and the Bill of Operations is key for us. We have a pretty extensive list of parts that would go into a section of a tower and with that you have the core components, and then you'll have some sub-assemblies and stuff that we may manufacture, or they may come bundled together, so we needed that functionality of, and with that when you look at the list of features that the Enterprise or the Manufacturing Edition provides, down-the-road is definitely something that we will be wanting to use.

Interviewer [Scott Church]: You know, what has been kind of the biggest surprise about working with xTuple?

I've learned that it's probably more encompassing than what I had thought, but the linkage, and hence, the enterprise piece of it has made me realize that when you say it's an enterprise, why it really is: from the CRM module to the item part of it to the accounting part of it, the purchasing, everything seems to just have tentacles that reach out into every aspect of the business. I think our engineers will be happy with the revision tracking; I think purchasing will be happy because of the mapping for expenses and in the relationship and rules you can put in place with different vendors and then, just the usability of it is very good for even the more novice computer users."